Fact-checking sights right, left, and center:
 Accuracy in Media (a conservative citizens' watchdog group, watching mainstream media for fairness, balance and accuracy in news reporting). See, for example, Ken Burns: Student of Historyor Left-Wing Gasbag?
 AP Fact Check (fact-checking stories that aren't entirely true, saying so, offering the facts)
 Bad Science (Ben Goldacre's column from The Guardian in weblog format. Covers media misrepresentations of science, especially medicine, by the author of Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients
 Charity Rating Guide & Watchdog Report (Charities rated from A to F on how much of the money they take in is spent on fundraising rather than charity, Charity Watch, formerly American Institute of Philanthropy).
 ClaimBuster (authomated live fact-checking). See Meet the bot builders: How our student team is automating fact-checkers work (Julianna Rennie, Reporters Lab, 4-30-18) A team of Duke students is building tools that automate the most tedious task for fact-checkers: finding claims to check.
 Climate Feedback (a worldwide network of scientists sorting fact from fiction in climate change media coverage--to help readers know which news to trust)
 Dollars for Docs search tool (Pro Publica). Use this to see if your doctors receive money from drug or device companies (which might influence which drugs and devices they prescribe)
 Duke Reporters' Lab database of global fact-checking sites. Use the map to find fact-checking sites around the world or browse the fact-checking sites (listed by continent)
 Evidence-based medicine, links to resources such as HealthNewsreview and Cochrane Collaborative.
 FactCheck.org (Annenberg's excellent nonpartisan political fact checker--monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, and interviews.
 FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a national media watch group)
 FEC Itemizer (Derek Willis and Sisi Wei, ProPublica, and Aaron Bycoffe, Special to ProPublica. Updated regularly.) Browse Federal Campaign Finance Filings
 Flack Check (FlackCheck.org) is Annenberg's companion site to FactCheck, designed to help viewers recognize flaws in arguments in general (politics, science, and health) and political ads in particular. Video resources point out deception and incivility in political rhetoric.
 The Fact Checker (Glenn Kessler's Washington Post column, The Truth Behind the Rhetoric, fact checks statements by politicians and political advocacy groups and doles out one to four Pinocchios for politicians' statements that don't pass muster)
 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) (Challenging media bias and censorship since 1986), a national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
 Hall of Justice (Sunlight Foundation) A robust, searchable inventory of publicly available criminal justice datasets and research.
 International Fact-Checking Network (code of principles and verified signatories).
 Media Bias/​Fact Check, a fact-checking website that indexes and ranks websites by left- or right wing bias, as well as by quality of factual reporting.What I like best: the lists of publications/​sites that are right-biased, left-biased, left-center and right-center biased, and least biased.
 Media Matters for America (MMfA), a politically progressive media watchdog and advocacy group with a stated mission of "comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media."
 Newsbusters. Media Research Center (MRC) "exposing and combating liberal media bias"
 NPR Fact Check: Trump And Clinton Debate For The First Time NPR's politics team, with help from reporters and editors who cover national security, immigration, business, foreign policy and more, live annotated the first Clinton-Trump debate. Great service!
 On the Issues (every political leader on every issue--what they said, how they voted)
 OpenSecrets.org (Center for Responsive Politics). Tracks money and its effects on U.S. elections and public policy. Advocates for transparency in government, monitoring campaign contributions and lobbying, to measure their possible effect on U.S. elections and public policy. Keeps track of which representatives in the U.S. Congress receive contributions from which companies or organizations. Lets you easily track campaign spending and contributions and tracks the money that the private sector, industry groups, unions, and other lobbyists spend to lobby Congress.
 PolitiFact.com (nonpartisan political fact checker, whose truth-o-meter ranks findings from "true" to "pants on fire"--especially handy during political campaigns), a St. Petersburg Times service, recipient of Pulitzer Prize. Here are articles on current issues, events
 PunditFact (Tampa Bay Times and the Poynter Institute, dedicated to fact-checking the accuracy of claims by pundits, columnists, bloggers, political analysts, the hosts and guests of talk shows, and other members of the media)
 Quackwatch (your guide to quackery, health fraud, and intelligent decisions, operated by Stephen Barrett, MD)
 Regret the Error (Craig Silverman, on Poynter site, reports on trends and issues regarding media accuracy and the discipline of verification. Stories about errors, corrections, fact checking and verification. There is also a book: Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech
 SciCheck (FactCheck.org's site for fact-checking false and misleading scientific claims that are made by partisans to influence public policy)
 The Skeptic's Dictionary. exploring strange beliefs, amusing deceptions, and dangerous delusions since 1994. See Skeptimedia Archive
 Snopes.com (David and Barbara Mikkelson created this in 1995 as a site about urban folklore site, which expanded t0 fact-check internet rumors and, as one of the first online fact-checkers, other stories of doubtful veracity.
 The Straight Dope (Cecil Adams, Fighting Ignorance Since 1973) Check message boards.
 Sunlight Foundation (making government & politics more accountable and transparent)
 Verify (WUSA-9, DC news) Is Tuesday the best day to book a plane ticket? and similar questions, but maybe not easy to view online, after the day it comes out.

(assembled by Pat McNees)
Fake news includes fictitious articles deliberately fabricated to fool readers and profit through clickbait; fake news websites (often spoofing/​mimicking legitimate news websites) designed to mislead readers for financial or political gain (whose partisans complain of "censorship," when fact-checked). It spreads through social media.
 Newspapers are Fighting Harder Than Ever Against the Spread of Misinformation (Jennifer Swift, Editor & Publisher) When an explosion rocked Manhattan on a recent Thursday afternoon, the local media went into a frenzy. The Twittersphere became like the classic game of telephone. If your mother shares something on social media, check the source before you share. Since the advent of the internet, reporters on every regional and national panel have been asked how the web has made what has always been a cutthroat competition to get things up and get things up first even worse.
 This media literacy program made people better at identifying disinformation. (They still werent great at knowing what to trust.) (Laura Hazard Owen, Nieman Lab, 5-16-18)
 Youre extremely gullible and theres probably not much you can do about it (Lisa Fazio/​The Conversation, Popular Science, 4-3-18) Failing to notice what you know is wrong. Why humans stink at finding falsehoods. That's why Fact-checking sites are so important.
 Fake news and media literacy (blog post)
 Mad Magazines clout may have faded, but its ethos matters more than ever before (Michael J. Socolow, The Conversation, 5-11-18) Think for yourself. Question authority -- Mad Magazine's editorial mission statement has always been the same: Everyone is lying to you, including magazines. Think for yourself. Question authority, according to longtime editor John Ficarra.
 Is it satire or fake news? Depends on who you ask (Daniel Funke, Poynter, 4-30-18) Sites that mock (like Onion) and "Fake news sites often claim theyre satirical, only to fabricate entire stories without a semblance of humor or irony  all the while profiting off clicks."
 The Era of Fake Video Begins (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic, May 2018) The digital manipulation of video may make the current era of fake news seem quaint. the problem isnt just the proliferation of falsehoods. Fabricated videos will create new and understandable suspicions about everything we watch. Politicians and publicists will exploit those doubts. When captured in a moment of wrongdoing, a culprit will simply declare the visual evidence a malicious concoction.
 Can artificial intelligence beat fake news? (Brooke Borel, ScienceWriters, 5-3-18) The automated fact-checker Claimbuster was pitted against a human fact-checker to see if it could detectd fake news from InfoWars, a known peddler of fact-challenged posts. Claimbuster won for speed but not for ability to spot fake news about global warming.
 List of fake news websites
 How To Spot A Deepfake Like The Barack ObamaJordan Peele Video (Craig Silverman, Buzzfeed, 4-17-18) This "deepfake" video starring Jordan Peele as Barack Obama shows how easy it's getting to create convincing audio and video fakes. Here's how to fight back.
 Can AI solve the internet's fake news problem? A fact-checker investigates. (Brooke Borel, Popular Science, 3-20-18) "The Pew Research Center reported last year that more than two-thirds of American adults get news on social media, where misinformation abounds. We also seek it out. In December, political scientists from Princeton University, Dartmouth College, and the University of Exeter reported that 1 in 4 Americans visited a fake news sitemostly by clicking to them through Facebookaround the 2016 election." The Duke Tech & Check Cooperative is supporting the development of virtual fact-checking tools (robots), including ClaimBuster and TruthGoggles. Can they "recognize context and nuance, which are both key in verifying information" or spot sarcasm or irony? They tested ClaimBuster to see if it could detect fake science news from a known peddler of fact-challenged posts: infowars.com. "The trick will be getting the accuracy to match that efficiency."
 Fact-checking the network. (Denise-Marie Ordway, NiemanLab, 4-17-18) Journalists Resource sifts through the academic journals so you dont have to. Roundup of academic research on fake news, audience analytics, populism, VR, and fact-checking, from several academic reports:
---Fact-checking efforts almost never reach consumers of fake news.
---"The findings suggest Twitter users are more likely to accept corrections from friends and individuals who follow them. But theyre less likely to accept corrections to an error related to politics than another topic."
---Overall, a closer relationship with journalists on Twitter is associated with lower levels of perceived media bias.
---There is little research focused on fake news and no comprehensive data-collection system to provide a dynamic understanding of how pervasive systems of fake news provision are evolving."
---"About 1 in 4 adults visited a fake news site  mostly Donald Trump supporters looking for pro-Trump content. An estimated 15 percent of Hillary Clinton supporters read at least one article from a pro-Clinton fake news website. Interestingly, the findings suggest that 'fake news consumption seems to be a complement to, rather than a substitute for, hard news  visits to fake news websites are highest among people who consume the most hard news and do not measurably decrease among the most politically knowledgeable individuals.'
---'The big takeaway: Reporters and columnists argued that a host of factors contributed to Trumps success, while academics largely credited the media. Journalistic discourse generally asserted that Trumps victory occurred due to media illiteracy in the public; social media propagation of fake news and allowance of filter bubbles; and failure of the press to understand the depth of voter anger. Scholars viewed the rise of Trump as predictable, when considering long-established routines of the press; journalists misunderstanding of both the public and populism; and the dire economics of legacy journalism.' --from Populism, Journalism, and the Limits of Reflexivity: The case of Donald J. Trump
 A claim-by-claim analysis of a climate denial 'news' story (Brooke Borel, Popular Science, 3-20-18) An excerpt from a professional fact-checker's claim-by-claim analysis of a climate denial "news" story.
 How consumers can fact check the news in the age of misinformation (Julia Waldow, CNN Media, 4-2-18)
 Fact-checking sites
 This Company Made Up Fake News and Fake Celeb Quotes to Sell Supplements, FTC Says (Stephanie M. Lee, BuzzFeed, 11-15-17) A Southern California company has settled charges that it created fake news articles and fake endorsements from stars like Jennifer Aniston to push unsubstantiated health claims about supplements and make millions of dollars. According to the Federal Trade Commission, "this reporting and marketing was all untrue. The agency alleges it was part of a vast online network of fake news sites, fake customer testimonials, and fake celebrity endorsements that existed to promote unsubstantiated health claims about more than 40 weight-loss, muscle-building, and wrinkle-reduction products. It apparently worked: People nationwide spent $179 million on these products over a five-year period, the FTC alleges....On the order pages of these websites, customers were told the total cost for a 30-day supply of a trial product was $4.95 for shipping and handling. But once they entered their credit or debit card information, they were likely to be charged about $87 for the item  plus recurring amounts for future shipments, the FTC alleged. The websites didnt make their auto-enroll, cancellation, and refund terms clear, so many customers reported never seeing them, the FTC alleged. And getting a refund was hard."
 Faking News: Fraudulent News and the Fight for Truth (PDF, PEN America report, 10-12-17) Invaluable.
 How to squash fake news without trampling free speech (Callum Borchers, WashPost, 10-12-17) About the PEN report and its findings and recommendations.
 Fake news and media literacy (Pat McNees, Writers and Editors, 12-12-16 updated 2-11-18) Roundup of and links to important stories about who is producing fake news, why, with what consequences and effects, and what we can learn from what analysts are saying.
 How to Spot Fake News (Eugene Kiely and Lori Robertson, FactCheck.org, 11-18-16)
 How half true happens (Justin Peters, Columbia Journalism Review, 8-30-12) Our correspondent sits in as PolitiFact editors rate Nikki Haley's claim.
 Snopes Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors ( Kim LaCapria, Snopes, 3-6-17) Snopes.com's updated guide to the internet's clickbaiting, news-faking, social media exploiting dark side.
 Lets fight back against fake news (Aaron Sharockman, PolitiFact, 11-16-16) See PolitiFact's newsfeed about recent fake news
 Fact-checking fake news reveals how hard it is to kill pervasive 'nasty weed' online (Joshua Gillin, PunditFact, 1-27-17)
 Google Rolls Out Fact Check Tool to Combat Fake News Worldwide (Good News Network, 4-13-17)
 Confessions of a Trump Fact-Checker (Daniel Dale, Politico, 10-19-16) "The fewest inaccuracies Ive heard in any day is four. The most is 25. (Twenty-five!) That doesnt include the first two debates, at which I counted 34 and 33, respectively."
 The New Yorkers chief fact-checker on how to get things right in the era of post-truth (Shelley Hepworth, CJR 3-8-17). People who have never been involved in journalism, in fact-checking, think the world is divided into facts and opinions, and the checkers just deal with facts, says Canby. For us the bigger complexity is what we think of as fact-based opinions .The way you construct an argument, if there are egregious missing ingredients to it, then its something we bring up.
 How Fake News Turned a Small Town Upside Down (Caitlin Dickerson, NY Times Magazine, 9-26-17) At the height of the 2016 election, exaggerated reports of a juvenile sex crime brought a media maelstrom to Twin Falls  one the Idaho city still hasnt recovered from. A report inaccurately blaming Syrian refugees for a crime spread throughout Twin Falls. As more time passed without a solid account of what happened, lurid rumors continued to surface online and came to dominate conversations in grocery stores and at school events, sparking an outcry of hatred and anger.
 2016 Lie of the Year Award: Fake news ( Angie Drobnic Holan, PolitiFact, 12-13-16) "Fake news is made-up stuff, masterfully manipulated to look like credible journalistic reports that are easily spread online to large audiences willing to believe the fictions and spread the word. In 2016, the prevalence of political fact abuse  promulgated by the words of two polarizing presidential candidates and their passionate supporters  gave rise to a spreading of fake news with unprecedented impunity."
 Maybe the Internet Isnt a Fantastic Tool for Democracy After All (Max Read, New York Magazine, 11-27-16) "Powerful undemocratic states like China and Russia have for a while now put the internet to use to mislead the public, create the illusion of mass support, and either render opposition invisible or expose it to targeting."
 Fake news website (Wikipedia). Good overview and good links to more resources.
 Study suggests people less likely to fact check news when in company of other people (Bob Yirka, Phys.org, 5-23-17) Phys.org is also a good fact-checking site.
 How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News (Craig Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, BuzzFeed News, 11-3-16) BuzzFeed News identified more than 100 pro-Trump websites being run from a single town in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The young people "who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook  and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters....Most of the posts on these sites are aggregated, or completely plagiarized, from fringe and right-wing sites in the US."
 Ignored factchecks and the medias crisis of confidence (Brendan Nyhan, Columbia Journalism Review, 8-30-12)

 Public domain resources (The Public Domain Review's excellent links--from here you can link to the PDR version of sites below to find public domain resources)
 Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online (The Public Domain Review)
 Creative Commons search tool (beta, ith list-making and one-click attribution)
 DPLA (Digital Public Library of America)
 Flickr: The Commons (begun in 2008 to increase access to publicly held photography collections and to provide a way for the public to contribute information and knowledge)
 HathiTrust's digital library
 Internet Archive (Wayback Machine)
 Last 20 (Sonny Bono Memorial Collection)"We believe the works in this collection are eligible for free public access under 17 U.S.C. Section 108(h) which allows for non-profit libraries and archives to reproduce, distribute, display and publicly perform a work if it meets the criteria of: a published work in the last twenty years of copyright, and after conducting a reasonable investigation, no commercial exploitation or copy at a reasonable price could be found."
 Library of Congress (PDR links to public domain, by medium, style, time period, genre, content, type, rights)
 The Medical Heritage Library (promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine; a digital curation collaborative among some of the worlds leading medical libraries)
 The National Archives (UK government's official archive, 1,000 years of history)
 Project Gutenberg (free ebooks)
 U.S. National Library of Medicine (NIH). Includes PubMed/​MEDLINE, MeSH, UMLS, ClinicalTrials.gov, MedlinePlus, TOXNET, Images from the History of Medicine, digital collections, LocatorPlus, and other databases--not all public domain)
 Wikipedia Commons (for images, sound, and other media files)

 **Newsroom Navigator (NY Times links to resources for reporters and editors, great for fact-checking)
 PubMed Central (PMC), a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/​NLM).
 Radio-Locator (links to over 15,300 radio stations' web pages and over 10,400 stations' audio streams from radio stations in the U.S. and around the world--plug in city name, zip code, etc., and find available radio stations)
 NASA Pubspace (easy public access to the peer-reviewed papers resulting from NASA-funded research).
 Ulrichsweb (Global Serials Directory). You can access Ulrich's periodical directory in any library, do a boolean search, and download a list of every specific type of newspaper in the U.S. or world, sorted by circulation,
advertising page rate, or anything else you might find useful. You will find editor's name and phone number, etc., which will usually be out of date. But call to say you are fact-checking the name of the editor and you may get the editor you want. Norman Bauman (my source for this item) suggests sorting by advertising rate to find the publications that can afford to pay freelancers decently.
 What will yesterdays news look like tomorrow? (Adrienne LaFrance, Medium.com 4-4-14)
 Front Pages (today's plus an archive of front pages from U.S. newspapers from key days such as the inauguration), The Newseum
 Today's Front Pages (check out Newseum's U.S. map -- move your cursor across the map and see the front pages change)
 U.S. news archives on the Web (for papers in states from Alabama to the District of Columbia)
 Newspapers.com (3,500 newspapers from the 1700s2000s)
 Wikipedia list of online newspaper archives (with hyperlinks)
 Google's historical newspaper search
 Mike Dash's list (of larger major-language newspapers or multiple-title archives, mostly, that are searchable and can be accessed privately online - anything, essentially, that looked beyond the narrow purview of small-town doings and local politics for its news)
 ProQuest Archiver (hosts archives for 130+ newspapers, with coverage as far back as 1764. Searching is free; small fee to view the full article.
 U.S. newspapers, by state (USNPL, also major news Twitter feeds)
 SmallTownPapers (read free 250 small town newspapers)
 GenealogyBank's Historical Newspaper Archives (over 320 years of obituaries, birth, marriages and newspaper articles about other key life events)
 America's historical newspapers (Readex's online database, from 1690 to recent past)
 Google News
 HealthNewsReview.org rates health and medical news stories (about medical treatments, tests, products and procedures) for accuracy, balance, and completeness. See fuller entry below
 EurekAlert, sponsored by AAAS, the science society, as a way to disseminate info through reporters to the public. There's a public section, a reporters section, and an embargoed news section (for research appearing in peer-reviewed journals). News is filtered by subject: Agriculture (crops, food, forestry...), Archaelogy (new world, old world), Atmospheric Science (climate, pollution...), Business & Economics (health care, grants...), Chemistry & Physics (energy, atoms, superconductors...), Earth Science (geology, oceanography...), Education (science literacy, K-12, graduate...), Mathematics (models, systems, chaos...), Medicine & Health (cancer, diet, drugs...), Policy & Ethics (patients, treaties, laws...), Social & Behavior (addiction, parenting, mental health...), Space & Planetary (astronomy, comets, space missions...), Technology & Engineering (electronics, Internet, nanotechnology...). And various portals: News for Kids, Marine Science, Nanotechnology, Disease in the Developing World, Bioinformatics, Multi-Language.... And there is a Calendar of events in science (by month).
 Internet Public Library (IPL). Find resources by subject, newspapers and magazines, special collections, material for kids and for teens
 The Legislative Process (Congress.gov) Scroll down to find links to invaluable resources on government.
 Newslink . See Most-linked-to local news sites by U.S. state
 News Sites (SPJ Journalist's Toolbox)
 Knight Science Tracker (hot science news, peer reviewed by journalists)
 MediaFinder (database of U.S. and Canadian newspapers, magazines, catalogs, newsletters, and journals)
 Newswise (chiefly for journalists). List of Newswise services (Daily Wire, MedWire, SciWire, LifeWire, BizWire)
 Online news (links to various resources)
 Talk to The (New York) Times: Q. and A. With Staff Members
 Consumerist (a consumer affairs blog, hosted by a division of Consumer Reports)New York Times Learning Navigator (Rich Meislin, a selective guide to the Internet)
 NY Times Business Navigator
 NY Times Politics Navigator (a selective guide to political sites on the Internet)
 NY Times Health Navigator
 The Cochrane Collaborative (systematically reviews and evaluates research in health care and health policy)
 Miscellaneous research tools (SPJ, Journalists' Toolbox)
 BONG: The Burned-Out Newspapercreatures Guild (BONG) (available on Topica), humor column Charles "Charley" Stough of Dayton, Ohio. ran starting in the 1990s.

Under Wikipedia's rules--learn them before you contribute--secondary sources must support an article. (No original research.)
 Wikipedia (The "free encyclopedia that anyone can edit" -- being voluntary, it is not always correct. It is not peer-reviewed, but it often provides a useful overview on a subject, and sources through which to learn more.) See Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Britannica (Daniel Terdiman, CNET News, 12-15-05--the error rate for each encyclopedia was not insignificant) and Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? (Stacy Schiff, New Yorker, 7-31-06)
 Students defend the future of facts on Wikipedia (Holly Else, times Higher Education, 1-15-18) Wiki Education hopes to bring academia and Wikipedia closer together.
 Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale (Adam M. Wilson and Gene E. Likens, PLoS, 8-14-15) The authors "present an analysis of the Wikipedia edit histories for seven scientific articles and show that topics we consider politically but not scientifically controversial (such as evolution and global warming) experience more frequent edits with more words changed per day than pages we consider noncontroversial (such as the standard model in physics or heliocentrism)....As our society turns to Wikipedia as a primary source of scientific information, it is vital we read it critically and with the understanding that the content is dynamic and vulnerable to vandalism and other shenanigans."
 Wikipedia Manual of Style
 Identifying reliable sources (Wikipedia)
 Control over Wikipedia content (Wikipedia policy)
 No original research (Wikipedia policy. See Primary, secondary and tertiary sources "Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable, published secondary sources and, to a lesser extent, on tertiary sources and primary sources. Secondary or tertiary sources are needed to establish the topic's notability and to avoid novel interpretations of primary sources." Consensus (Wikipedia) Consensus is Wikipedia's fundamental model for editorial decision making, and is marked by addressing legitimate concerns held by editors through a process of compromise while following Wikipedia policies.
 Fact check: The New Yorker versus Wikipedia (David Robinson, Freedom to Tinker, 3-4-07) "This expectations gap tells me that The New Yorker, warts and all, still gives people something they cannot find at Wikipedia: a greater, though conspicuously not total, degree of confidence in what they read."
 All the News Thats Fit to Print Out (Jonathan Dee, NY Times Magazine, 7-1-07) How Wikipedia editing is managed.
 Wikipedia Training
 Help: Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
 Art of GLAM-wiki:The Basics of Sharing Cultural Knowledge on Wikipedia (by Sara Snyder, working at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 4-25-13)
 The 'Undue Weight' of Truth on Wikipedia (Timothy Messer-Kruse, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2-12-12). An "expert" on a historical trial gets his edits rejected because his is a minority view. Explained one Wikipedia editor: "Wikipedia is not 'truth,' Wikipedia is 'verifiability' of reliable sources. Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen to repeat a flawed account or description of something, Wikipedia will echo that." ..."familiarize yourself with some of Wikipedia's policies, such as verifiability and undue weight. If all historians save one say that the sky was green in 1888, our policies require that we write 'Most historians write that the sky was green, but one says the sky was blue.' ... As individual editors, we're not in the business of weighing claims, just reporting what reliable sources write."
 Paid advocacy as a conflict of interest (Wikipedia entry). See also
 Click capitalism: PR firms cash in cleaning up clients Wikipedia pages (Shaun Waterman, Washington Times, 10-21-13). This is not the first time that PR professionals have been accused of abusing the voluntary, self-policing character of Wikipedia to try to make clients pages more favorable, nor the first time false user accounts have been exposed.
 Wikipedia Probes Suspicious Promotional Articles (Geoffrey A. Fowler, WSJ, 10-21-13) The editors behind Wikipedia are accusing a set of contributors of manipulating the content of the community-generated encyclopedia on an unprecedented scale. The public relations firm Wiki-PR says what is was doing is paid editing, which is acceptable, not paid advocacy, which is against Wikipedia rules.
 Women scientists, Wikipedia under microscope in RI (WHEC, News 10, Providence, RI, 10-16-13) A Wikipedia "edit-a-thon" was organized to rectify the rarity of women scientists on Wikipedia (as in life). "Sara Hartse and Jacqueline Gu, both Brown freshmen and computer science students, said they first became aware of gender inequity on Wikipedia during an uproar in the spring when someone began systematically moving female novelists including Harper Lee and Ann Rice off the 'American Novelists' page and onto the 'American Women Novelists' subcategory."
 Wikipedia editors, locked in battle with PR firm, delete 250 accounts (Joe Mullin, Ars Technica, 10-21-13) Investigation follows reports that Wiki-PR scored Viacom, Priceline as clients.
 A Stand Against Wikipedia (Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Education, 1-26-07) Wikipedia has value, leading students to citable sources, but is not itself a citable source. Too often students cite inaccurate information from Wikipedia articles.
 The Decline of Wikipedia (Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review, 10-22-13) "The volunteer workforce that built the projects flagship, the English-language Wikipediaand must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulationhas shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking.'
 Wikipedians Leave Cyberspace, Meet in Egypt (James Gleick, WSJ, 8-8-08) In Alexandria, Egypt, 650 Devotees Bemoan Vandals, Debate Rules; Deletionists vs. Inclusionists
 Wikimania (Wikipedia -- an annual international conference for users of the Wikimedia Foundation's wiki projects (such as Wikipedia and its sister projects)
 Can Automated Editorial Tools Help Wikipedia's Declining Volunteer Workforce? (MIT Technology Review, 10-31-13) An algorithm that assesses the quality of Wikipedia articles could re-assure visitors and help focus editors on entries that need improving, say the computer scientists who developed it.

Services that help reporters and bloggers find experts and other sources and help the sources (including expert book authors) get publicity. The sources need to be helpful, quotable, and not too obviously seeking publicity!
 HARO (Help a Reporter Out) Peter Shankman's highly popular service, through which journalists on a deadline seek sources on specific topics.
 ProfNet. A journalist is writing a story and needs an expert to quote. The journalist uses ProfNet to find the expert. The expert helps the journalist and gets publicity. Includes ProfNet for Experts (Get Access to Journalists and Bloggers Actively Looking for Expert Sources.) and Journalists: Send a Query
 Hunting for Hermits. Jack El-Hai on searching for the intrinsically hard-to-find. LinkedIn proves more helpful than HARO and ProfNet.
 10 HARO-like Tools to Score Great Media Mentions for Your Business (2-26-13), an excellent description of ten resources from the publicist's viewpoint; but journalists can also use these PR tools to find sources. Provides descriptions of ProfNet (from PR Newswise), HARO, Reporter Connection (no longer active), MediaSpot.Me, SourceBottle, The Media Bag, Muck Rack, Media Kitty, ExpertEngine, Pitching Notes.
Reporters and writers: You'll get a lot of pitches from aggressive publicity seekers; you have to separate the wheat from the chaff. And of course sometimes the best sources are hard to find, are too busy to give interviews, and/​or don't particularly want publicity (or try to avoid it).

Abbreviations (abbr) are shortened forms of word or phrases, as Dr. for Doctor, lb. for pound, pm or p.m. for afternoon or evening. Wikipedia has a good explanation of variations on this theme. Initialisms are pronounced one letter at a time (FBI, DVD, KFC). Acronyms are pronounced as words (RAM for random access memory, NASA for National Aeronautics and Space Administration, laser for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation, sonar for sound navigation and ranging). Style guides vary on whether to use periods with initialisms (as each letter stands for a word); the New Yorker does (C.I.A.); most publications don't (CIA). Urban Dictionary talks of four types of abbreviations: shortenings, contractions, initialisms, and acronyms. Examples of shortenings: cont. for continued, hippo for hippopotamus. Examples of contractions: Dr. for doctor, St. for saint or street, can't for cannot. Here are useful websites for identifying the various forms of abbreviation.
 Abbreviations.com (Acronyms & Abbreviations)
 Acronym Finder (AF), look up acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms. Combined with Acronym Attic.
 Acronyma (acronyms and abbreviations in several languages
 Chat Acronyms and Text Shorthand (Netlingo)
 Text messaging and SMS abbreviations (Webopedia, slow-loading because huge)
 Urban Dictionary on Abbreviations.

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Directory of thousands of open access, peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals (which do not charge readers or their institutions for access), with link to journals' websites.

Place Finders. Software for locating old place names. Linda Coffin of HistoryCrafters (www.historycrafters.com) recommends two simple pieces of software, Animap and SiteFinder, put out by Goldbug software (www.goldbug.com), which work with a database of thousands of U.S. names for towns, counties, churches, schools, cemeteries, parks, railroads, townships, etc. Today they help you find not only current place names but also names from old records and databases that are no longer found in current maps and gazetteers.

SCOTUSblog (Supreme Court of the United States)--absolutely the best interpretations of what is going on in the Supreme Court. Here, for example, are stories about the decision onthe Affordable Care Act (Florida v. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, and National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius)

The following material was migrated here from the website of the late, great Sarah Wernick, by permission of her husband, Willie Lockeretz. It's a little out of date now -- I just have trouble deleting it because it's Sarah's!

Emailed Virus Warnings and Petitions:
A Responsible Approach

Someone emails you a warning about a scary computer virus. Or you receive a petition for a worthy cause that urges you to sign at the bottom and pass it along to all your friends. Before you hit the “Forward” key, check it out – even if the mailing came from a trusted friend or expert.

Virus warnings

People who pass along emailed virus warnings mean well - but nearly all these warnings are hoaxes. At a minimum, they waste time and cause needless worry. But some of these hoaxes are as dangerous as viruses, because they direct people to delete files that are actually necessary parts of their computer's operating system.
Before you forward a warning to others, take a minute to verify it at one of the many reliable anti-virus sites online. If the warning is legitimate, include a documenting URL when you forward it. That way, people can rely upon your information. And if you learn that it's a hoax, discourage others from spreading it further: Copy the debunking URL and send it with a brief summary to the person who warned you and to everyone else who received the warning.

For reliable information about viruses warnings, see any of the following:

Petitions

Has this urgent appeal to save NPR turned up in your inbox?

On NPR's Morning Edition last week, Nina Totenberg said that if the Supreme Court supports Congress, it is in effect the end of the National Public Radio (NPR), NEA & the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). PBS, NPR and the arts are facing major cutbacks in funding....

The letter asks you to sign a petition and forward it to as many people as possible. Don't bother: This petition has been circulating since 1995, and it's hopelessly out of date, as NPR explains on their website.
This is just one example of a petition that’s either pointless or a hoax. Think about it: Everyone submits the same lists, so there are hundreds or even thousands of duplications. How can such petitions be credible? And signatures are lost if someone breaks the chain.

Can it hurt to pass along a petition, even if you’re not sure it’s for real? Yes – because it wastes people’s limited time and energy for activism. Better to focus our efforts where they can do some good.

Here are other options:

Send people to an online organization that is collecting signatures – or that facilitates more direct action, such as writing to members of Congress.

If you want to start your own petition or find one to sign – visit Petition Online (http:/​/​www.petitiononline.com). As they explain: “Unlike the various flaky email petitions that periodically wander around the Internet, with PetitionOnline there is exactly one authoritative master copy of your petition. Each signature and email address (always required, but optionally confidential) is logged for possible explicit or statistical validation. Duplicate signatures are automatically rejected, and each person who signs is automatically sent a confirming email message.”

DuckDuckGo https:/​/​duckduckgo.com/​, a search engine for people concerned about privacy issues, where your searches won't be tracked. Click on "Press" in the lower left hand corner for info about DuckDuckGo's founder, MIT physics grad Gabriel Weinberg.

"A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people  people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book." ~ E.B. White

Maps That Changed the World. Peter Barber, head of maps collections at the British Library, shows ten of the greatest maps, from the USSR's Be On Guard! map (1921) to the London Tube Map (1933) to Google Earth. Fascinating.